Objective
I will create an original ArcGIS geoprocessing tool to calculate the FRAGSTATS AI directly in ArcGIS Desktop from appropriate gridded data. It may even possible for him to create a complementary ArcGIS tool for the enhanced AI (which is the basis of his Mathematics SHP).
Below is the abstract for this project, which will be presented at the Spring NEARC Conference (9 May 2016) as well as the CURCW at Westfield State University (6 May 2016):
Abstract
Python is one of the most useful scripting languages in the quantitative sciences. This is particularly true in geospatial analysis and geographic information systems, being that Python is the primary scripting language used in ArcGIS Desktop, the industry standard GIS.
In landscape ecology, the aggregation index is used to quantify the relationship between landscape types and their boundaries. This landscape metric is particularly useful, for example, in wetland area and coastal regions when evaluating the likelihood of erosion in erosion-prone and otherwise sensitive areas. The aggregation index is determined by calculating the relative N/S/W/E adjacencies of a raster grid and comparing the result to its theoretically optimal grid configuration. In practice, calculating the aggregation index is a complex analytical procedure which involves the use of gridded data (e.g. from ArcGIS Desktop) and then converting it for use in third-party software (FRAGSTATS) to interpret the data and calculate the aggregation index.
In this analysis, I present a new and more complex algorithm known as the intercardinal metric which measures not only the adjacencies measured in the aggregation index, but also takes into account the NW/NE/SW/SE adjacencies of diagonally-adjacent cells. This represents a more realistic representation of the landscape and its spatial variability and yields more robust and realistic results. This new algorithm is implemented as an ArcGIS Desktop geoprocessing tool using a Python script and therefore more user-friendly as all computations are calculated within ArcGIS Desktop without the need to invoke third-party software.